On 2012-07-18 09:27, Manger, James H wrote:
> HTTPbis part 7 (Authentication) introduces a new piece of ABNF labelled "b64token" [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-20#section-2.1]. It is also referenced/repeated in the OAuth2 Bearer draft spec. The new ABNF is necessary and explained quite clearly in the spec. However, the "b64token" label has already led at least a handful of people to mistakenly assume it always holds a base64-encoding. The examples in the OAuth2 Bearer spec were even changed so they were not base64-encodings to try to minimise the misunderstanding, but others have still made the mistaken assumption.
>
> How about renaming the ABNF production to "token68"?
>
> This label reflects the fact that it supports an alphabet of 68 characters (plus equal signs at the end).
>
> The new text in part 7 would become:
>
> token68 = 1*( ALPHA / DIGIT /
> "-" / "." / "_" / "~" / "+" / "/" ) *"="
>
> The "token68" syntax allows the 66 unreserved URI characters
> ([RFC3986]), plus a few others, so that it can hold a base64,
> base64url (URL and filename safe alphabet), base32, or base16 (hex)
> encoding, with or without padding, but excluding whitespace
> ([RFC4648]).
>
> --
> James Manger
Sounds good to me; if this reduces potential confusion we should to that.
Best regards, Julian